A graphics kernel driver typically interfaces between graphics client drivers and graphics hardware to assign graphics resources to each client driver and to administer the submission of graphics commands to the graphics hardware. Each client driver has explicit knowledge of the graphics resources it is assigned and references the resources in its commands using the physical address of the resources. As more sophisticated graphics features are developed, the demand for graphics resources is ever increasing but the graphics resources are limited by the graphics hardware and other system constraints. The assigned resources cannot be shared among clients because the graphics hardware is not designed to handle resource contention among the clients. Additionally, the client drivers are required to manage their own internal resource conflicts. For example, they must handle their attempts to use more than available graphics memory.